When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

Privacy-centric multimedia social networking service Multiply is releasing what it calls version 3.0 of its service tonight; Multiply targets users who are interested in sharing content with people they know in real life and exercising strong privacy controls. Privacy in social networking is the big selling point for SixApart’s newest service, Vox, as well. Vox is also strong on media sharing; users of both services can post text, photos and video in one place.

Now that Vox has finally launched after a long beta period and Multiply is coming out with new features and a new version, it’s a good time to ask…which one is better? If you’re looking for beautiful templates to chose between, a young hip crowd to network with and a company most likely to support emerging technology trends requested by early-adopter type users then Vox is the way to go. If you seek logical and robust privacy controls and shelter from an online world of strangers then Multiply is better designed. I prefer Multiply’s handling of media items and news feeds from your network of contacts. Vox is beautiful, Multiply is more functional.

Vox is the newest product of SixApart, owners of LiveJournal, MovableType and Typepad. Our previous Vox coverage is here. Multiply is privately owned and recently received $6 million in funding. Multiply is more than 2 years old and claims more than 3 million registered users.

Privacy Settings and Content Distribution

Privacy settings are the key issue according to both companies. Posts on Vox can be made visible to anyone, to just friends, to just family, to friends and family or just to you yourself.

Multiply allows more granular control: your friends, their friends and their friends, your family, their family and their family, your professional contacts, their professional contacts and their professional contacts, only direct contacts in either friend, family or professional contexts or only particular individuals added from contact lists importable from outside software. That’s quite a list of options and the interface makes it very workable. If you want to share something only with your family and their family, but not one more circle of family – well then I guess you’re out of luck. Sliders instead of check boxes could be useful.

Multiply says that there are many situations in which you’d like to share content with people one or two steps removed from your circle of contacts, but you don’t want to add those people to your contact list in order to do so. That makes sense to me.

In other words, if granular selective exposure is what’s important to you – Multiply is a better option than Vox.
Read More

Last week social software company SixApart launched Vox, its newest social networking and blogging service. The launch was high profile, the site is beautiful and many people (myself included) thought Vox was bringing something important to market. Not everyone agreed.

In the following QandA I queried Andrew Anker, Executive VP of Corporate Development at SixApart, about some of the biggest criticisms of Vox at launch. Prior to working at SixApart, Anker was co-founder and CEO of Wired Digital and a general partner at August Capital. I think these questions and answers will be of general interest to startups and social social software practitioners in general.

Anker told me that he thinks the social networking market is far from saturated and that there is a market in protecting privacy even if people don’t use it. He says that software can be both feature rich and accessible to non-technical users; that the world of online advertising is just beginning to move beyond “punch the monkey” style ads and has lots more room to develop as well.

The following are Anker’s replies, I’ll let you judge for yourself whether they are convincing. Graphics below are from a few of the site’s more than 150 layout templates.
Read More

Six Apart announced last night the launch of its newest social networking site, Vox (Vox announcement here). The company that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad has done a lot of things right with this new site. The benefits of having waited for consumer desire to mature before launching a social networking site are clear in Vox.

The service developed a reputation among some people during its beta period as a social network for artsy San Francisco elitists – but everyone needs a beta testing group and that’s a pretty good one to have. Vox was originally known as Comet and we first wrote about it here.

Besides all the basic features of a social networking site, Vox includes extensive privacy controls, a tag cloud for blog posts and a beautiful WYSWIG composition page. Privacy levels are a big part of the company’s strategy, Meena Trott in particular has been talking for some time about how the future of blogging will be found in small, closed groups communicating with each other online.

Profile pages can’t be edited directly at the code level, but there are a number of layout options and more than 165 sharp looking themes. There’s also easy mobile browsing and posting. Media elements can be placed into Vox pages with ease and the site integrates with YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, iFilm and iStockphoto. Several of these are competing companies and it’s great that they are all available to users. IStockPhoto would have seemed like a strange choice to me had I not met the company yesterday and seen that their work is actually very community oriented and interesting.

One of the things that users are going to love about Vox is that the advertising is incredibly unobtrusive. The business model here looks really smart. There are large sidebar ads only on the admin pages, search results and a few others, it’s great. You can view profile pages and explore the site without looking at big ads! There are a few very small ads in public user pages and users are encouraged to post about their favorite books and movies. Those can be purchased by readers through affiliate links that Vox will monetize as well. I talked to Six Apart’s Anil Dash and he says the advertising is going to basically stay the way it is.

There are a few things I wish were different about Vox. The fact that clicking on a Flash media player takes you to a different Vox page with little else on it is very counter intuitive. If support for microformats was offered and done as well in Vox as other things are, that would be great. I’d also really like to see OpenID support and easy import/export of user data. Dash told me that they support OpenID as a server today (you can leave comments in LiveJournal as yourname.vox.com for example) and will be adding full client support for OpenID login soon. Dash said the company is working on a number of things to make export easier.

Overall, though, I think that Vox looks great at launch. It’s obvious that it was built by an experienced team who have been paid attention to how the market is developing and what people want in a social network. It’s uniquely easy on the eyes and I wouldn’t be surprised to see people flock to it. There are hordes of people dying to get out of MySpace and as general interest social networks go Vox looks like a very appealing alternative.

San Francisco based SixApart, which owns the Typepad, MovableType and LiveJournal blogging platforms, will start letting users test their new Vox (formerly Comet) hosted blogging platform on Thursday, June 1. Initially a few thousand people will be let in, and they will ramp up from there.

Vox was initially introduced last fall at a DEMO conference (click here for details and a video archive of Mena Trott’s presentation).

Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags.

There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called “neighborhood” is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.

Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want – integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages.

Vox will be free and advertising supported.

More screenshots here.